I met Karan Mahajan, the Indian-American novelist and essayist, in 2018, when we were both fellows at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library. Karan was beginning to write The Complex, his novel that has just been released; I was finishing The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. I was drawn to Karan right away. Not only is he one of the best talkers in the world, ready to go anywhere in a conversation, but he’s also genuinely interested in right-wing politics. Since the rise of Trump, many on the left have tried to gain a better understanding of the right. Karan’s aims are both more modest and more ambitious. He wants to think and feel with the right. The Complex is one of those surprisingly rare novels that engages with the inner life of far-right leaders in the mold of India’s Modi, and of the ordinary people who vote for them. In this conversation, Karan and I talked about how the novel tells the story of the last seventy-five years of Indian politics, as well as the challenges of inhabiting the minds of right-wing characters. —Corey Robin
Corey Robin: Why did you choose The Complex as the title? What does it refer to?
Karan Mahajan: On the most basic level, the title refers to the complex in Delhi in which the large extended family at the heart of the novel lives. More importantly, the title reflects the mindsets of the characters in the book. Laxman Chopra, who is one of the main players, is the youngest of nine and a loser who’s trying to measure himself up against his late “great father.” He has a complex vis-à-vis his relatives who have immigrated to the US, even though those people don’t find their lives particularly satisfying, and he’s complexed in relation to this pantheon of independence-era figures—his father being one of them—who seem to have achieved epochal greatness. Laxman doesn’t see a means of achieving that in 1980s India, at the grubby end of the mixed economy, of the socialist dream of Nehru.
At another point in the novel, there’s a more capitalist character, Sachin, who says to his wife, “The whole country is complexed thanks to Nehru’s socialist policies.” His wife disagrees.
Robin: Tell me more about SP Chopra, who’s the founder of this family and the complex, but who’s also a founder of modern India. That theme—that founders of families are also founders of countries—is such a rich subject in my field, political theory, and yours, literature. Could you talk about the tensions and parallels between the founding of the family and the founding of India?
Mahajan: I wanted to pick a very particular kind of individual as the figurehead of this novel. SP Chopra is a freedom fighter, but he’s also a banker who’s extending loans to Indian revolutionaries and to the British. He is libertarian in his impulses. He’s not aligned with Nehru. He belongs to this whole strand of Indian history that’s been forgotten, one which included the pro-business Swatantra Party. SP’s attitudes are then amplified by Laxman, who seeks an ideology but lacks his father’s substance.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it a negative inheritance. But an inheritance can be completely warped, much as we see with “Make America Great Again.”
Nor did I want SP Chopra to be revealed to be a fraud. Maybe there can be goodness and greatness in one’s past, even if it’s not the kind that I completely agree with. But does this past have to be a liability, especially in the male psyche? Why can’t one escape or process an inheritance and forge ahead? Why are societies at large panicking when they look around at the newer, hybrid world we all inhabit—one in which women are security guards and Dalits are behind the desks of government offices—and thinking: We need to go back?
These questions came out organically in writing the novel, and especially when Laxman, who is really detestable, becomes a negative narrative engine. He possesses the energy in the novel, in much the same way that right-wing movements command political energy right now.
Robin: The parallels between Laxman and Trump are clear. He’s corrupt, he’s skimming off the temple’s coffers to fund his business, and he’s also a failed businessman. His father thinks he’s an idiot. Even he thinks he’s an idiot. He’s filled with humiliation and resentment. He’s a sexual predator. Yet Laxman is a surprisingly sympathetic character. He has genuine love for one of the women he ends up having an affair with. He’s self-aware: he sees himself as other people see him, and he’s forward and direct. I’m interested in the novel’s sympathy toward him. I’m also interested in a claim repeated by many characters in the novel: that Laxman is born to be a political person. What is it about him that makes him seem so eligible for political life?
Mahajan: This is where maybe Trump was in the back of my mind. The other characters notice his shamelessness, his ability to move forward and not be stymied by conscience.
Robin: But he has something that Trump doesn’t have: self-consciousness, self-awareness. Shameless people usually don’t see themselves as other people see them.
Mahajan: True, but he has a blind spot. He’s not concerned with how people who are less powerful than him will perceive him. For example, he thinks, I can take liberties with this woman. She will probably not like me, but it doesn’t matter. Yet he doesn’t want shame to be brought upon his nuclear unit or the extended family. He wants to be perceived as respecting the hierarchy of the clan.
After I was done with the book, I remember thinking about something you wrote in The Reactionary Mind: about how conservatives see democratic movements as “a terrible disturbance in the private life of power,” and how the conservative or reactionary response has been to “cede the field of the public, if you must, but stand fast in the private.” Laxman acts out in the private sphere in response to public disappointment.
For me, as a writer, the key moment in the novel occurs when Laxman’s opportunism gives way to ideology. It’s the year 1984. The nascent BJP has been decimated at the polls following the anti-Sikh riots and Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Yet Laxman refuses to give up on the BJP. He has fully absorbed a doctrine of resenting minorities, and believes his family has been suppressed in much the same way the nation has been.
Robin: You’ve just identified part of the political appeal of these shameless figures, which is that they’re not just domineering. You show the side of them that is desperate. They start off powerless. They’re contending for power, which makes them multidimensional.
Mahajan: Laxman is also unfortunately in sync with the larger reactionary culture. In that stratum of Indian society, at that moment in history, most people would have believed that, in sexual assault, the woman is at fault. Many Punjabi Hindus would have quietly felt that Muslims and minorities were being given too many sops. Laxman’s verbalizing the impulses of the silent majority under the Congress (the secular, liberal party that dominated Indian politics for the first forty years after independence).
Robin: Your portrayal of the silent majority’s sensibility toward the Congress is subtle. The disillusionment comes out casually, in everyday conversation and throwaway references. The Congress is still a force in that it’s an institutional power, but it’s running on fumes, it’s seen as corrupt—and that’s among the Chopras, who are a family of Congress people. It reminds me of the best histories of the fall of the New Deal order, which show how there was a rot within that made it vulnerable. The question isn’t Why did it collapse? It’s Why did it take so long to collapse?
Mahajan: That’s why Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were important to include peripherally in the novel. The Congress represents dynastic politics, and the novel unfolds in the shadow of the Emergency (the imposition of authoritarian rule by Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977), which partially delegitimized the Congress’s claims to being democratic. Then there are the proto-BJP people who were jailed by Indira and who, in a sense, learned the art of political repression from her. Similarly, the Congress perpetrates the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the BJP pretends to oppose them, only to perhaps use those riots as a model for the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 under then-chief-minister Narendra Modi.
I was interested in that iterative version of history, where you’re always learning from the thing you oppose. And I’m reminded of what you write about in The Reactionary Mind, which is that right-wing movements, for all their reactionary impulses, are often modern in attitude because they’re actively gaining energy from opposing the left. This is not a classical conservatism descending from the Vedas in India or from the Constitution in the US. I didn’t want to make Laxman a learned religious person. The culture, in fact, is sitting lightly on him, and he feels much closer to that culture when he’s opposing the regime that he thinks has been imposed on him. Or as you write, the reactionary “seeks to enjoy [his advantages] precisely as they are being—or have been—taken away.”
Now, I have a question for you. You’ve written two books analyzing and thinking about conservatives: The Reactionary Mind and The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. People have asked me what it feels like to “spend time” with people like Laxman whose behaviors or opinions one abhors. What is it like for you as a writer and theorist?
Robin: Until recently it wasn’t a problem. I enjoyed living with, being with, studying people who initially seemed distant and strange, even abhorrent. They felt like people who had to be figured out. Everybody has a story, which can turn into a shtick. The trick is to get inside it. And it felt like a challenge to translate what I’d found back to people who are not on the right. As with all travel writing, I had to bring these “foreign” elements back home.
But something has changed for me since the rise of Trump. I find it almost impossible to understand the anti-immigrant and xenophobic elements of the right. I don’t have an ounce of nationalism or patriotism, but the one element of American history that stirs me emotionally—the one thing that I think the United States, for all its faults, once got right—is immigration. Seeing how immigrants are always reinventing and retelling the American story, making it more alive and more present, I genuinely don’t understand how can people be against that.
A bigger challenge for me is that the right today is mostly derivative and unimaginative. When I read the right, I don’t see or hear much, at the deepest levels, that I haven’t seen or heard before. And I see a lot of scholars and journalists with a bottomless appetite for that derivativeness, and I can’t work myself up to the enthusiasms of their reading. Part of what I was drawn to in your novel is that even if the political landscape is familiar, the psychic landscape is not. It’s filled with new minds and surprises, and things blowing up in unexpected ways.
Mahajan: I wonder, though, when I hear you talk about a block, whether the xenophobic right is a subject you will end up writing about precisely because you find it hard to comprehend.
Robin: That may be a bridge too far for me.
Mahajan: What was the entry point for you into the mind of Clarence Thomas in The Enigma of Clarence Thomas?
Robin: Thomas has a story that’s rooted in the experience of the Ivy League, which is a story of humiliation and of resentment that’s familiar to me, even though he tells it through the paradigm of race and thinks that’s the only paradigm in which it can be understood. When people on the left, particularly white people, “otherize” Thomas by saying,“His whole politics of resentment is just about being snubbed at Yale,” I think, “Can’t you identify with that at all?” On the other hand, Thomas is this total narcissist who really does seem to think humiliation never happened to anyone but him.
Mahajan: In writing about figures like Thomas or Laxman, there is an automatic tension that comes into play because they have already been identified as “bad” by those most likely to read your work. Do you think that generates a frisson?
Robin: Yes, but maybe not in the way you’re getting at. There are moments in the writing where I’m inhabiting the mind of, let’s say, Thomas, and reconstructing his arguments, and I suddenly feel lift-off from the immediate evidence that’s in front of me. It feels like flying. I don’t think it’s a moral frisson, an excitement that I’m with the bad boy or something like that. It’s more like: This is somebody who is illegible to many people, and I’m rendering that person intelligible but without that simple script. To me that feels like writing.
Based on the way you deal with Laxman, I think we both know that monsters aren’t interesting if you render them as monsters.
Mahajan: I want to come back to what you said about travel. For example, I’ve noticed that, in my fiction writing, I’m not interested directly in the facts of my own life. Instead, I’m drawn to certain subjects or images in an inexplicable way. Writing about individuals with different ideologies is a version of that. I wonder if you feel less excited writing about people who are in the same ideological realm as you are because you already agree with and understand them.
Robin: Definitely. I feel that most when I’m teaching. My teaching is best when I’m dealing with writers who are not like me. The ones who are like me, I have a hard time making them interesting and worth reading. And I think that’s partly why, for many years, I stayed away from writing about the left. It’s not that I don’t think about myself and the ideas I share with the left. It’s that whenever I try to render them on the page, they feel inert.
Mahajan: Now I want to pose a moral question. Obviously, what one doesn’t want to do, as a writer, is revel in the evil or badness of a character or the worst instincts of the right. This is a point Coetzee makes in “The Problem of Evil” in Elizabeth Costello. As a novelist, my own strategy has been to inhabit my “bad” characters very physically and to let their objectionable behaviors emerge sideways, through their actions. A character’s racism, for example, wouldn’t be the center of the frame, because making it central is what the person who is viewing them as a racist is doing. But when you say that you want to “see the world through [Thomas’s] eyes,” how do you avoid the problem of, say, overly sympathizing with his views?
Robin: As you were talking, I thought of Hannah Arendt, in her portrait of Eichmann. This is exactly what she does and always gets attacked for. She writes, for example, about how, at the end of the war, when all the Nazis are trying to figure out what’s going to happen to them, Eichmann’s obsessed about whether Kaltenbrunner, who’s his senior, is going to invite him to lunch. Yet he has no memory of all these details of a transport in which tens of thousands of people were killed. People thought that Arendt was trying to diminish Eichmann’s evil, but I think she was trying to do what you’re describing: to find a way into the being of somebody who could perpetrate such crimes.
With Thomas, it wasn’t so hard, because he does it for you. In his memoir, he begins with the food that he ate in Pinpoint, this particular kind of crab and different kinds of seafood. He tells you the music he was listening to at critical moments in his life, what he was wearing. From those details and others, you begin to get a picture of someone who is definitively placed somewhere in time, who has specific tastes and preferences, distinctive dispositions, in the way all people do, that don’t tell you about his politics but do give you a feeling for him as a person. From there you start thinking about how such a person, in this case, Thomas, moves through the world as a Black man, yet says and does things that make life terrible for Black people.
Going back to Elizabeth Costello, I want to emphasize what you said, about not reveling in the evil. This is a huge problem. It’s not just an aesthetic problem; it’s a political problem. It’s one of the things that I’ve always hated about left-wing writing about the right, which is that it seems to revel in the right’s evil. But it’s a bigger challenge now. We have this cesspool in the White House, and I see the way people on the left love to talk about it. Every horrible detail. It’s a dead end—it’s like enjoying a horror movie; it’s not really thinking about what’s going on there. The alternative isn’t letting it go, maintaining silence about it, but taking those details as signs of something other than movie-level monstrosity, using them as a beginning for understanding something we didn’t understand before.
Mahajan: What are the other common mistakes that novelists and theorists make when writing about reactionaries?
Robin: There are two, and both speak to how well you write about the right. Judith Shklar, the political theorist at Harvard, wrote a book called Ordinary Vices. Her second chapter is about hypocrisy and why we hate it. But she takes great pains to remind us that hypocrisy is not the worst vice. I never appreciated her point until recently, but it’s useful advice for thinking about the right. The right’s hypocrisy often gives the left orgasms. The left always needs to relearn the lessons of Hegel and Marx—beneath any surface contradiction, there’s a complex and elusive unity. It’s our job to find it, not to dwell on the contradiction or hypocrisy, because dwelling on it keeps the unity in obscurity.
The other mistake involves how we deal with sex and shame. There’s an easy story to tell about the right’s sexual morality, which is that it derives from repressed “deviance,” that is from repressing desires that the right deems deviant yet members of the right still feel, only more so. It’s a convenient script that tells you little. Most people, across the spectrum, have all kinds of shame associated with sex. It’s part of what sex is, it’s part of what often creates desire. One of the virtues of your novel is how intelligently it deals with the subjects of sex and shame.
Mahajan: For me, my novels don’t work till I have the characters’ sexual drives figured out. I experienced this with my characters in The Association of Small Bombs as well. At the time, the larger discourse around Islamic fundamentalism was so puerile that it made my task easier in some ways. The idea that fundamentalists were committing terrorist attacks because they didn’t have sex! It’s shocking that this was a mainstream view.
But that brings me to the next question, which was the one about novels. You’ve written, “Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power…. It is also why it has so often fallen to our novelists to explain to us our politics.” Were there specific novelists you were thinking about or reading for The Reactionary Mind and The Enigma of Clarence Thomas?
Robin: There are some classics that inspired The Reactionary Mind, one of which is The Leopard. But the truth is: there aren’t a lot of great novels on the chaos of reactionary thought, and I think the reason can be found in our society’s vision of politics.
In Britain, Macaulay famously writes, “Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace.” Compare that to Hegel, in Germany, who writes that “all the worth which a human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the state.” For a lot of Anglo-American political writers, government and politics are limited in scope, an instrument for keeping the peace. I think this is why we’ve had a tough time, particularly in the US, with political novels, whether of the radical or reactionary variety. I don’t think it’s an accident that the greatest political novels in the US are by Black authors, like Morrison and Ellison, for whom politics is closer to what it was for Hegel, that is, for whom it’s clear that politics weighs upon all of our inner lives, our entire spiritual reality.
I wonder how this maps out for you in India. My sense from your novel is that weaving politics into the personal is not nearly as difficult there as it is here. Is that true?
Mahajan: Yes, but that’s because of an inversion of that Macaulay quote about government existing solely to keep the peace. When a government fails at basic tasks, it is suddenly everywhere in the lives of its citizens. To paraphrase Hegel, one’s spirituality is forcibly squeezed through the toothpaste tube of the state. And the history of government in India has been one of massive failures—corruption, infrastructural collapses, bureaucratic delays—which press down on the daily lives of individuals even in the middle and upper classes. Indians are more political because they have no choice but to be political.
Then there’s history. Most people in India are only two or three generations removed from the upheavals of India’s independence and partition. As a Punjabi from Delhi, for example, I can still connect certain social attitudes toward women or Muslims to the violence of partition. American literature would feel quite different if the War of Independence was just in the rearview mirror.
A more cynical part of me worries that the Indian political novel has hardened into a genre—here’s a person, here’s a riot, here’s a sprinkling of postcolonial history. But a genre that attempts to capture the nexus of the personal and the political is preferable, in my mind, to the autobiographical evasions of so much American fiction, which simply replicates the atomization of American life without confronting its causes. Make American writing political again!
